Anna Solomon - Leaving Lucy Pear

Maybe it wasn’t a very good sentence, as far as sentences went. Josiah didn’t worry about that. Susannah would fix his grammar, smooth any awkwardness, tweeze out just enough but not too much of his townie roots, clean him up, as she always did. And he liked the idea behind the sentence. He thought it established not only his nativity but his inescapable devotion to the place, and he guessed that was important when a person was running for mayor. The trouble came when he tried to speak the sentence aloud and his tongue went limp on the word “children,” which he and Susannah had been trying and failing to produce for the entire seven years and three months they had been married. He knew the numbers because Susannah kept track in a small leather journal and updated him on their progress, or rather lack thereof, each month. She might have kept track of the days and hours, too, though if so, she spared him that. Josiah did want children. The thought of their smooth heads running around provoked a drumming in his chest — he liked the idea of two, one boy, one girl, disturbing the order of his and Susannah’s house. But he also liked order. He liked quiet, it turned out, a discovery since leaving his clamorous childhood home. He didn’t mourn, as Susannah did, on a daily basis, the dreamed children’s absence. But then he tried that first sentence and his mouth wouldn’t do it — his tongue simply stopped, a flaccid rebellion. The children flung themselves at him with their sweet-smelling hair and noisemaking and he felt at once a crush of grief and the cold humiliation of having told a lie.

“Sir?” Through the door came the muffled plea of Josiah’s assistant, who was already being bombarded by men waiting to see Josiah. It was Friday morning. By ten o’clock, the line might be twenty deep. He had arrived hours ago, when the sky was still pink, determined to finish the speech before anyone arrived.

“Just a minute,” Josiah called. He removed his face from the wall, straightened his jacket, and, to bolster himself, took a minute to regard the activity down in the pit. From this height, a ten-foot slab of granite rising through the air on dog hooks appeared light as a child’s toy. The ladders looked like matchsticks, the men on the ledges like ants, their movements — swinging hammers, setting drills, maneuvering hooks — barely visible. Here you are, Josiah told himself. Running the quarry. Running for mayor. Last winter, his father-in-law, Caleb Stanton, had retired from the company’s day-to-day business and put Josiah in charge and here he was, in Caleb’s warm, leather-scented office, entrusted with Friday Favors, a tradition begun years ago by Caleb to enhance the company’s reputation. Caleb, it seemed, had created or invented almost everything in Josiah’s life, including his mayoral aspirations, for Caleb himself was too old now to run, and besides, too many powerful people envied him. Josiah, the rookie, the native-born son-in-law, was the perfect foil. So what if he had left school after eighth grade, like most of his friends? He had spent more time in front of the bathroom mirror than his mother and three brothers combined, regarding his strong chin and sky blue eyes, the both-feet-planted-shoulders-back bearing he had never been taught, and now a muckraker at the Gloucester Daily Times had dug up proof that Josiah’s opponent in the mayoral race, Frankie Fiumara, once attended a rally for the socialist Eugene Debs. That Fiumara was Italian didn’t help him. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were once again dominating the news: the findings of Governor Fuller’s Lowell commission were soon due, the public waiting to see if the shoemaker and fishmonger would finally be executed. It had been seven years since their first trial for the murder of a payroll clerk and his guard in South Braintree, and six since their second, and still, though no evidence linked them clearly to the crime, the anarchists remained in prison. Around the world, people had risen up in protest. They had marched, gone on strike, bombed American embassies, named streets and cigarettes after the men. The cry was foul play: Sacco and Vanzetti had been tried for their politics and convicted for their foreignness. All this might have worked in Fiumara’s favor — Gloucester was full of Italians. But there were more Irish, and plenty of blue-blood WASPs, and still more people who, though it didn’t make them proud, simply didn’t like the look of the two wops. And so Josiah Story, boy from Mason Street, was likely to be mayor, if he could just give a few decent speeches and rally the women’s vote.

The women were still new to voting. The women were key. And Josiah had a plan to win them over, by eking an endorsement out of a leading dry named Beatrice Cohn. See? Josiah urged himself. Here you are. With a plan. It’s April. Almost spring. All these men are here to see you.

The door opened, then shut again, letting in a brief roar from the waiting room. Josiah didn’t turn at first. He waited to hear his assistant say, “It’s time, sir.” Then he turned.

Sam Turpa was a tall, skinny boy who would stoop like that until he filled out in the chest and shoulders. Josiah had chosen him for the job because he was loyal, because he was Finnish — the quarrymen liked seeing one of their own in a decent suit up in the office — and because Josiah did not trust himself to keep a woman at his side all day, as Caleb had. Josiah’s eyes were the wandering kind. Back in the day, before Susannah, other parts of him had wandered, too. He was prone to a pretty smile, flattery. And so, no women. Susannah suffered enough.

“Who’s here?”

“A Mr. Taylor, sir, and his brother. An Italian named Buzzi who says you said you had a job? Various innkeepers. A lobsterman…”

“The Italian is pronounced ‘Boozy,’ I think.”

The boy nodded, too harried to appreciate the joke. “Who should I send in?”

“Shall,” Josiah said, correcting Sam as Caleb had once corrected him. “Who shall you send in.” He gave the boy an apologetic smile, reached up to ruffle his straw-colored hair, seized with longing, then moved away, toward the porthole window. “Let’s see.”

He recognized Buzzi right away, a carver from Naples who’d come to Josiah’s door a month ago, saying he could turn stone into lilies. There were the “hotel” men looking for alcohol and whores, as if Josiah had been born with both in his pockets. He could locate them, of course, but it would require telephone calls, perhaps a drive. If he were his blacksmith father, he would turn his sign around, go upstairs to his small apartment, and sleep. His father, though not a lazy man, had no stamina for negotiating, even on the price of his work. But Josiah wasn’t his father. He had surpassed his father. A couple years ago, Josiah had offered him a job heating the iron rims for the garymander wheels and his father had declined, complaining that Josiah worked his men too hard. “It’s not me, it’s old Stanton,” Josiah explained. His father simpered. “Said like a future dictator,” he said, and went back to the hammer he’d been mending.

Josiah met with Buzzi first, then a ship captain who had sixty cases of full-strength, authentically labeled brandy waiting four miles offshore in need of runners, then a pair of young men who had done some running for Josiah in the past and were eager to do more. Deals were falling into place. He liked the game of it, the exercise of working out what the men would owe him in return, making them think, as his father-in-law advised, that they were getting a good deal. “They have no idea,” he said, “how much money you have access to. They can’t fathom it. They hear ‘rich’ and they think a stand of timber, a heap of clams. They don’t know that they are worth more to you than you will ever make yourself to them.” Caleb’s choice of words wasn’t lost on Josiah: how much money you have access to. But this was part of what he liked about Friday Favors: that he wasn’t required to be himself, exactly, but a representative for someone else. He was like a playactor giving play money away.